First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  At this opening session, however, I was wedged in between white linen and green duck, trying hard not to inhale the evil cigar smoke. Then I caught sight of a familiar face across the room. The tall forehead was higher than I remembered, helped by a receding hairline. The pale hazel eyes shone like headlamp, and I fancied their beams would sweep up and lock on me like a truck zeroing in on a rabbit. The body seemed athletic as ever, although the waist had thickened.

  He was in deep conversation with two senators, their little group ringed by aides and, even in this powerhouse, awed followers. While one of the senators with his back to me was be speaking, Gordon Pollock raised his eyes, looking right at me. There was no dividing instant between casual glance and recognition. He looked up as if he had been keeping an eye on me for hours. Those arched eyebrows raised a fraction. His head nodded minutely. Then the eyes returned to the senator.

  I felt like a distant satellite receiving a high-speed, blip-squealed message from Earth. With a look and a nod, Pollock had said: “Hello, hello. It’s been a long time. You’re looking about as old as I expected. Do you still have your wagging tongue? Are you fit for a fight, boy? We are finally matched in an arena worthy of both of us. You killed my brother. I don’t have but a second to spare for you now. I will destroy you later, at my leisure.” End of message and close the circuit.

  I’m not telepathic, but this one time I could hear every word in that casual-cool voice. His hatred was beautifully masked, but it gleamed there like something rotten and phosphorous under his smile.

  From the congressional directory, I knew Pollock was a ranker in the majority Republican party. He represented the New York district that included Nyack and most of Rockland County, the rich semi-farming communities west of Tappan Zee on the Hudson. His unofficial position was third-assistant whip and shepherd to the new Mexican congressmen who had landed on his side of the aisle. As always, Pollock was a comer.

  In the opening address, Speaker McCanlis tallied the problems facing the nation and the legislation that Congress would, in response, be proposing during this session.

  First among the problems was the condition he quaintly called “unrest.” Rioting had continued in the cities. It had gradually shifted and focused, ending up in the poorest pockets of the East and South as a free-floating phenomenon. Any big city, however, was likely to catch fire; Denver, Los Angeles, and Oakland in the West had all erupted in their turn. Military jurisdictions in Mexico had not stabilized either—although there the guerrillas vanished into the mountains and jungles, instead of across the tenement rooftops. Everyone still used automatic weapons and captured grenades.

  McCanlis conjured words like “breakdown of civil and moral authority” and “unresolved racial tensions.” But they were just smoke. Every skin color was represented in the vandal bands that washed through these cities. And the police forces and National Guard units—if they represented any kind of “moral authority”—were hardly broken down. They were better organized and equipped, with more firepower, than ever before.

  No, the problem, as framed in the garbled communiqués that had been issued by the loose-knit guerrilla associations, was a breakdown in popular expectations. The pay-as-you-go society was leaving larger and larger segments of its people behind. Not everyone is a capitalist entrepreneur. Not everyone wants more opportunities than assurances in his or her life. A lot of people can’t even see straight enough to tie their shoelaces before 10 a.m.; so they resent the burdens placed on them by true economic freedom.

  This long-simmering brew of want and envy had boiled over when the Mexican war began siphoning loose cash out of the economy. I knew well the extent of that drain, having personally funneled a billion or two off to support the Homeless Bastards in Yucatan and to build a few schools and hospitals along the way.

  Compared to the free-for-all running firefight in the cities, the nation’s second, third, and fourth runner-up crises were minor league. Violence in the expanding drug trade. Collapse in key financial sectors as the government fine-tuned the prime interest rate. Russian and Chinese violations of air space, coastal oil fields, and fisheries. Et cetera. Mostly economic problems.

  McCanlis spoke like a stage magician who has a single card up his sleeve and wants you to believe it’s a flock of live doves. I could see that the man had outrun the limits of his power and imagination. The floor was hardly listening to him.

  On coming to Baltimore, I had picked my committee assignments carefully. I tried to get on the International Strategy Subcommittee. There, if anywhere, a successful general in the Gentlemen Volunteers could make use of his experiences and expertise. The old-line career politicians, however, had that bench all filled up. The Insurance Subcommittee of the House Banking and Finance Committee had been my second choice. I thought it would be fertile ground, representing an industry on the edge of ruin, and it was. Almost as an afterthought, I took the junior seat on the Urban Affairs Committee. And that, of course, was going to land me right in the middle of the cities’ running firefight during the next couple of months.

  Early in my first term, the Larkin-Redgren bill came up. It was approved out of International Strategy unanimously and went to the floor with a strong recommendation to pass from the majority Republican side. It was a measure to revoke the commissions of the Gentlemen Volunteers and withdraw all troops from Mexico, returning those States to independence as a nation. Larkin-Redgren was clearly an attempt to reverse the collapse of our cities, as the preamble admitted in stumbling prose.

  Whoever cooked this one up must have parked his brains in the side lot: The text of the bill was issued in both English and Spanish, to accommodate all of our new members. The majority whip and all his elves, including Gordon Pollock, chased all over the floor, praising Larkin-Redgren to the skies, in both languages. The honorable members from Mexico nodded and puffed their cheroots. The bill crashed and burned on the first vote.

  Urban Affairs had a selection of instruments for dealing with the national unrest, but our new members from south of the South had some very direct ideas. The abortive Mendez bill called for martial law, a 7 p.m. curfew, water cannon, and suspension of habeas corpus. There was one piece of legislation—a perennial, I was told—that proposed a separate Black Nation to be formed in, variously, Montana, Arizona (if the Indians didn’t mind), and Rhode Island (if the Old Money didn’t mind). It had to be a joke, right? Except that the authors, an estranged coalition of the Black Caucus and old States Rightists, were deadly serious. Nothing even resembling legislation that could pass constitutional scrutiny was sent out of our committee in my first term.

  The rioting went on, picking up the pace of violence as the summer of 2015 heated up. The Old Man of the House, McCanlis, showed his age as he called on us repeatedly for some kind of action. With each speech his lion’s mane was a shade whiter; the hand that gestured with the gavel shook more; the heavy baritone reached for a higher note and cracked on the vowels. The country was killing him before our eyes.

  Finally, during an August heat wave that baked the pavements and muffled Baltimore and the East like a pillow, Speaker McCanlis resigned. But I wasn’t in the House to hear his farewell speech. On a Thursday evening, after a late session of the Urban Affairs Committee, I was introduced to an urban affair of my own.

  It was while driving back to Baltimore from the new Capitol Complex, which was northeast of the city proper and across the Patapsco Inlet from Fort McHenry. To live in, Carlotta and I had bought the old Commerce Exchange on Commerce and Water Streets. Its simple brickwork, round-topped windows, and extra-high ceilings had appealed to me. The south-facing windows on the top floor looked down two blocks past the World Trade Center to a slice of the Inner Harbor. And the building could be made defensible. So we lived there and I commuted to the complex.

  “Driving back to Baltimore” sounds like I was honking along at sixty, arm out the window with the top down, doesn’t it? No, I was in the back seat of a plain blue GEM sedan with my
driver and burly boy in front. The car was special and didn’t look it: armor plate under the plastic skin, bulletproof glass all around, tires filled with high-temp, ripstop jelly.

  Out ahead somewhere, weaving through the traffic and watching for us, was a Harley motorcycle with a leather freak astride it. Leather freak had a radio in his ear and a mike on his larynx, talking to burly boy. He also carried a silenced 9mm and a handful of penades. Somewhere behind us was a white van, Parker House Rolls, with four more burlies, a .50-caliber recoilless on swivel jacks, and a collection of shoulder-mount rocket and grenade launchers, plus the heat they were carrying concealed. Slam on the brakes and in three seconds they would be outside and making little ones out of big ones over a 200-yard radius. They were all trusted men, special picks from the Homeless Bastards, trained in the desert and sharpened in Yucatan.

  My own armaments? Well, the honorable representative from Deaf Smith District carried a pocket knife with a scissors and nail file on it. And my own hardened hands and feet.

  This rig was our normal commuting convoy. The colors of the vehicles changed. Sometimes there were two motorcycles. For state occasions, we laid on a helicopter with “TV-52 Sky Eye” markings. But reinforcement in depth was our formula.

  Somebody had figured it out … or sold out our secrets.

  That Thursday evening, the first hint of trouble we had was when Chickie, the cyclist, went off the air. Burly Amos in the front seat was still tapping his ear and whispering deep in his throat when we spotted Chickie. He was in the middle lane of the turnpike, under the rear wheels of a city bus that was flashing “Not in Service” on its route sign. Both Amos and I swiveled to look out the rear window for Parker House. John, the driver, kept his eyes ahead and picked up speed by a fraction.

  Parker House was closing the gap when a truckload of kraft paper, a flatbed trailer piled high with brown rolls four feet long and a hundred-odd pounds apiece, swerved. The strapping on those rolls came loose and the van disappeared under a pounding avalanche. I saw one side of it collapse before our guys slid over into the guardrail.

  “What should I do, General?” John asked.

  “Keep driving,” Amos answered for me in a harsh, strained voice.

  “Right,” I affirmed.

  Suddenly, the highway was empty—of course, with all that wreckage behind us, and our not slowing down to rubberneck. The driving was smooth and eerily quiet. Up ahead the sun was going down in our eyes.

  “It could all be coincidence,” John began. “I mean, the bus … Chickie always did take chances on that hog … and then the truck. They never check those—”

  “Shut up, John,” Amos grated.

  “Don’t think,” I said soothingly, as Sensei Kan would have done. “Spread your senses. Look with your ears and listen with your eyes. Trust your guts. Be ready.”

  John drove on like an oiled machine. But I could see Amos’s head going side to side like a frightened horse.

  We didn’t have to look far. Four cars, heavy-sprung oldstyles, closed in on us from the front, back, and sides, like white blood cells mobbing a germ. They had bronzed privy-glass in the windows, which had been fashionable a few years earlier. So we couldn’t look in, except through the windshield of the vehicle behind us. All we could tell was the faces were dark, maybe masked.

  Our revised motorcade was slowing down. John tried once to ram the car in front, but hemmed in as we were, there was no room to fall back and get up decent speed. Next, John nosed into its rear bumper and floored the accelerator. But the other car just snugged in and let us burn rubber. After a few seconds, John took his foot off it and let the inevitable happen.

  Amos rolled down the window on his side and started to take aim at the driver in the car on our right. They rolled down both back and front windows and bracketed Amos’s head with about six assorted rifle and pistol barrels. He put down his weapon and closed the window.

  “Anything else we can try?” I asked. John shrugged in answer. Amos slumped. “Then we sit back and see where we’re going. If they wanted us dead, they would have rolled a grenade under the car two minutes ago.”

  “If they wanted you dead, you mean,” Amos said quietly. With that thought spoken, we stopped being a team and became three men in a sedan. Where we were going was the waterfront district, east of Fells Point. Our car cluster took the offramp three abreast, which raised a lot of dust from the shoulder, and one of the outriders peeled off a no littering sign with its bumper. That didn’t slow them.

  When we got to the narrower surface streets, the formation slid into two ahead and two behind. John was ready to dodge down any likely side street, except our escort kept us moving so fast we probably would have flipped out and rolled. I ordered him to stay in line until they dropped the speed. They never did.

  The first zing of sniper fire peeled a strip of plastic off our hood. The second pocked the fender on the vehicle ahead of us. From a side street came a burst of automatic fire that must have chewed up number one’s tires, possibly also its riders. The car swerved out of line and crashed into a mailbox, carrying it on into the closed grille of a storefront. Evidently our escort was crossing enemy territory to get to wherever they were taking us.

  Still moving at seventy miles an hour, we roared down a cul de sac and into the open drop-door of an abandoned warehouse. Loose planking thundered under our wheels, so I guessed we were on a wharf or pier over the river. That’s when the car ahead hit the brakes. We all slid around in circles on the oil-soaked, dusty wood, smashing up fenders and doors pretty badly. A couple of tires blew before we ended up near the far wall, all upright, and pointing every which way.

  Our escort recovered quickly. They were out of their cars with a dozen weapons leveled before we could get our restraint belts off and the sedan’s doors open.

  Even in the dim light, reddish with the setting sun, we could see the deception. They were supposed to look like black men, but it was makeup. I noted the pale flesh of their eyelids, the light color of their lips. They would only be taken for urban guerrillas from a distance.

  “Drop weapons! Hands on heads!” one of them shouted. Amos and John made a great show of letting the hardware slip from their fingers and clatter on the planking. We all cupped our skulls.

  Poking with shotguns and pistols, the captors separated us. My bodyguard and driver were taken toward the still-open door and into the early evening. To be killed? To be paid off? I don’t know. After the affair was over, we tried to trace them and got no leads at all. That works out either way, doesn’t it?

  But, as Amos said, it was me they wanted. The warehouse had an inside structure built along the river wall. It looked like an old wooden meat locker with four doors into it. Half a dozen men with weapons dead-centered on my stomach—they must have appreciated my skill at hand-to-hand combat—walked me over, through the one door that was standing open, and slammed it on me with a thunk.

  It was absolutely black in there. The first impression that came to me was the faintly sweet smell of old, dried blood. Like a butcher shop on a Sunday. As my eyes adjusted, I could see faint differences in the blackness. Gaps in the wood were letting in the evening glow and new fresh scents: water, sewage, tar, spices, and strangely enough—popcorn. Sooner or later the smell of my own sweat, urine, and shit would join them, then overpower them. If I was kept here in hard accommodations. Or if I stayed long enough.

  As my senses adjusted, I began exploring with my fingertips. The door was faced with sheet metal. It had been scratched and gouged. Somewhere there would be, as required by law, a plunger to release the latches from inside. Were they that careless …? No, here was a stump of iron rodding, sawed off recently by the feel and taste of it. Door hinges were on the outside.

  The interior of the locker seemed to be paneled in matchboard. I measured distances with my hand, then gave it a hard back blow with my elbow. Nothing gave. I explored the point of impact and could feel neither dent nor splinters. Nothing. So it was oak or
some other hardwood, backed by a solid subsurface. I had been hoping for pine backed by studs.

  And where was the light coming from? Ah, the ceiling of this locker had been ripped out. Above it, beyond the top of the locker structure, was a dead space between the inner and outer walls of the warehouse. Vents high in the outer wall were letting in enough of the evening light for my adjusted eyes and enough air that I wouldn’t suffocate.

  Jump, heave, and leg up. I could move around in the dead space, but I found there was nothing loose up there. The refrigeration machinery had long ago been stripped down to bulky bare frames and motor parts. There was no way into the other lockers.

  I dropped down, deciding to take it slowly. I might be here a long time.

  Chapter 15

  Billy Birdsong: First Foray

  I had taken three platoons east to clean up a guerrilla nest near Chichen-Itza. During a break in the fighting, my wing of Stompers had settled on the parklike grass that stretched between the crooked columns of the Temple of the Warriors and the stepped pyramid known as the Castle. With the green grass, the white stones, and a hot sun in the blue sky, it was a beautiful place— except for the random crack of sniper fire.

  I was standing outside my command ship, jawing with a recon group, when the signals section from Merida broke in with a priority transmission. They said it was a call from the States, relayed through our satellite downlink, which over the months had grown pretty wobbly. So the voice quality was shot to begin with; it did not help that Carlotta sounded on the edge of tears, too. Incredible as that was to anybody who knew her.

  “Colonel, can you hear me? Colonel? … Colonel?”

  After ten seconds or so, I thumbed the mike and told her: “We are on open air here, Carlotta. It is polite for you to say ‘over’ so I can switch to transmit and answer.”